How The Children’s Society redesigned, redeveloped and launched their website with a focus on #FightingForHope
Author: Rebecca Martin, Digital Project Manager,
About our organisation
The Children’s Society (TCS) improves the lives of the most disadvantaged, vulnerable young people in the UK. We work to improve the hopes and happiness of those facing abuse, exploitation and neglect.
Our challenge
TCS has been supporting young people for 140 years. 2020 was the year to revisit our vision and goals for the next decade. We knew a new website would play a central role in overturning the damaging decline in young people’s well-being.
We needed a website that would educate our audiences about the issues young people face, inspire them through authentic stories from the voices of young people, and provide a seamless user experience to encourage people to invest their time, their voice, or their money. The last significant development of the website was ten years ago. This involved a new content management system (CMS), a review of the user experience, user testing, and a new look and feel. A few years later in 2014, the site content was re-focused and the visuals were brought in line with the new TCS brand.
Our plan
Along with a new vision and goal, a full brand refresh was run along-side the website project. The new TCS brand brought to life the stories of youthful hope we know exists in those who have it toughest of all. This was reflected in the colours, images, and bespoke handwritten font to articulate the voices of young people. The website would be the first instance of our new brand coming to life.
The project had a very tight turn around — even without the chaos of a global pandemic. Our goal was to launch our new website in 10 months. This included a Discovery phase, copy, photography, user experience (UX) design, user interface (UI) design, search engine optimisation (SEO) and build. As you can imagine, a lot of passion and energy from many key stakeholders and subject matter experts internally and externally were needed to achieve this (please see credits at the end of this article).
Discovery
This is when we got to grips with all the flaws in our existing website. Users found the site difficult to navigate, our organisational purpose wasn’t clear enough, there was too much content, and the look and feel was outdated. Only 12% of our website users were returning visitors. To put it bluntly, there was plenty of work to get on with.
TCS is a large and complex organisation with a huge range of audiences. Previously, the website tried to meet the needs of all audiences and thereby failing to meet the needs of any audience. We knew the website would benefit from a refined, targeted approach.
It was at this point we refreshed our target audience, to focus on new and existing supporters, and our three strategic pillars — educate, inspire, and invest. We made the decision to upgrade to Drupal 8.9 to improve content management, which we knew would be crucial to the site’s success.
Content
A full assessment of our new target audience and a deeper understanding of our target segments kicked things off. This helped us to establish our key user journeys and mental models. A full site content audit was completed, we drastically reduced the amount of content to focus our messaging and positioning. A new, lean sitemap was established. A new content strategy was created in-line with our core pillars. This strategy covered content creation, content governance, and SEO.
When COVID-19 restrictions were relaxed and it was safer to do so, we hosted photography shoots in London to get the gritty, yet optimistic photography and videography we needed. Copywriting workshops were held to ensure our new brand was reflected in our tone of voice.
Design
Drawing on the brand refresh, high-fidelity mobile-first wireframes were created. The new look and feel had a greater focus on bold imagery, optimistic colours, and the voices of young people through the bespoke typeface. Illustrative elements gave a more human, hand-drawn look to the webpages. Motion and animation provided an engaging experience.
Development and SEO
We took an Agile-Scrum approach to development of the site so that we could launch with a minimum viable product (MVP) on the 5th of October, 2020. This was a highly involved process, with fortnightly Sprints and demos. It allowed us to have transparency and iterate throughout the build process. A Jira board was set-up and tickets were prioritised into four Sprints.
An overhaul of our existing Google Analytics (GA) set-up meant that when the site launched, we were ready to track performance against our new key performance indexes (KPIs).
A full quality assurance (QA) and user acceptance testing (UAT) process across browsers and devices ensured all work was to a high standard and the risk of bugs was minimal.
Results since launch
In the five-months since launch, we are already smashing many of our KPIs. In comparison to the old website, the new website has seen some astounding results. Some of our top highlights are a:
- 636% increase in the number of users who make a donation
- 1,322% increase in the donation completion rate
- 28% decrease in bounce rate
There is still plenty of work to do, but it is extremely encouraging to see supporters reacting so positively to the new website.
A donation, a few hours of your time, or lending your voice to a campaign all helps TCS be there for young people who are holding onto hope. If you would like to show your support, please find out more about how you can do so here.
On-going optimisation
We are committed to ongoing enhancements. We have already completed one round of user testing with our target audience, and will continue to do this periodically.
Since launch, we have completed two further Sprints’ worth of work to further optimise the site. This included additional functionality and tweaks to improve the navigation based on our user research. At the moment, we are planning an ongoing test and learn program that will be adopted into business as usual (BAU). This will include a review of our across-platform tracking and analytics tools, and A/B user journey testing.
Conclusion
There is always more to learn and things we could have done differently. Completing an entire website redevelopment in 10 months during a global pandemic is no easy feat. We were committed to a deadline and we went live on-time, which even in ordinary circumstances is remarkable.
This wouldn’t have been possible without a huge team of enthusiastic, driven individuals who wanted to make a difference to the lives of young people who face serious hardships. Thank you to everyone at TCS who helped shape the website into what it is today, and to the agencies who provided their vital expertise.
There is so much more we could share about the inner workings of this project. We will be publishing some deep dive articles in the near future — watch this space!
Thank you to:
GOOD Agency — Brand refresh
BMB — Brand Vision and Strategy
Nomensa — Website Discovery phase
Numiko — Website Content, Design, Build
Data Inspires — Google Analytics and Tag Manager set-up
